Biography

Ben Prather received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. After a Metropolis Fellowship at Los Alamos National Labaratory, Ben
joined the BHI as a Fellow. His research focuses on state of the art global simulations of black hole accretion systems, with an emphasis on understanding the
communication between large and small scales in low-luminosity AGN, including Event Horizon Telescope sources.

I am a graduate student in the physics department currently working with Michael Johnson. I am a theorist with an interest in developing analytic techniques for use in the EHT and, more broadly, General Relativity. I am currently working on new approximation methods to help extract information from the observational visibility of a photon ring.

Simon completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2025 before joining the BHI and the Harvard University physics department as a postdoctoral research fellow. Simon works broadly on aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence. His research draws on methods from Penrose’s twistor theory, integrable theories, and topological strings, among other areas, to gain a better understanding of holographic dualities in asymptotically flat spacetimes. He is particularly interested in the role of black holes in this context.